Monday, July 30, 2012

I Post Therefore I Am?

WWDD? (Rene Descartes by Frans Hals)

An article by Vibhu Norby entitled, Why Social Media Is Endangering Our Future, starts out saying “Everybody wants to be famous, Nobody wants to be nameless, aimless” "...
Because to be searchable and indexed on Google is to be, we are in need
of exposing our lives more and more on public channels to permanently
plant ourselves in the memory of the Internet.
Nobody wants to be
forgotten. We are losing control over our content as well as how we are
represented online. That power is entirely in the hands of social media
and search companies".

Today a very good friend posted on facebook the following, "If you aren't writing to be immortal,
you are wasting your time and ours."
Another friend and blogger at Have Coffee Will Write replied that he writes to understand what he thinks. I then read a blurb about designer Philippe Starck at Design Within Reach. In a video at the site Starck states what I believe that everything worth doing should start with mission and that mission informs goals and objects which in turn express the mission. I think this can be and perhaps should be applied to just about everything.

One of my clients has enlisted my services to market and advertise for their company. Early on I learned the client had no defined company mission. They had products but as far as I was concerned would have a difficult time reaching an intended audience/clientele, developing a niche and their brand without a reason for being. In our initial meeting I inquired "why do you do this, what drew you into this particular realm, what services do you provide" and so on.

Perhaps ironically, I've never written a mission about why I write or more to the point of this muse why I post to social media. I have a personal facebook and two fan pages, Google+ personal and biz, I try to stay on top of two blogs and I am leaving one or two things out.

I do have a personally mission statement I pull out every now and again and peruse to see if I'm on track and if things have shifted,changed or expanded. It is at the end of this piece.

Am I one of the everybody that wants to be famous of whom Norby speaks? Do I not want to be aimless nameless?

I don't agree with Vibhu Norby that "We are losing control over our content as well as how we are represented online. That power is entirely in the hands of social media and search companies."
I believe that whatever control we don't have we have never had and that if nothing else John Q. and Alice P. Public have more access to the entire world than ever before. A case can be made for the fact we don't know and do not exercise what control we have. This stance may bespeak my ignorance in this area but perhaps it is more that Vibhu may not understand the significance of the fact that "anyone" has access to "everyone." It certainly was not the case as I was growing up in the 60's. If you were not associated with a powerful publisher whether it was McGraw-Hill or the Cleveland Plain Dealer not many would ever know your thoughts existed, the access did not exist.

For some time I've been thinking about things I want concerning work and employment and recently I have concluded that my ability to write and high order thinking can possibly pay some bills. Thus far things I want from writing are basically in my personal mission. I never want to be complicit in an organization's actions that don't have the goodwill of public in mind. I don't really even want to work for organizations like this however I find this is very difficulty to avoid. I've found no matter how good an organization is on paper it is given to those in charge and directed and informed by their ethics and morality or lack there of, there understanding of the world. This is one issue that kept me out of advertising years ago that back then I feared I didn't have the integrity one really needs in advertising.
Now I have the integrity and the experience if not wisdom to lay a foundation for everyone to glean and hold up to scrutiny for their own good and the good of the organization.

One organization was a bit dismayed because I sent a treatise of sorts concerning a project in which I might become involved. After deciding to work with this organization and the organization deciding to work with me I received a call from the HNIC questioning my ability to communicate coherently in writing.

So as of recently one reason I write is because it will pay bills, but once again why social media write on a personal note?
I think writing to become immortal may be part of the equation. If I want to write to understand what I think and I think too I do I would need less of an audience than I am trying to reach. Do not we all think about posterity and legacy? Some people will leave property, money, goodwill in their name a legacy of community service and all of these can be comprehended through social media. Some will leave an often used piece of art like a watch, a homemade recipe or literary legacy I think that is sublime.

Foremost in my thoughts however I use social media because I love to discuss and share and hear what others say that might inform and grow my world and social media satisfies this desire with immediate gratification. As immediate as it is it also affords one the opportunity to go back to a discussion one may have been too emotional about to listen to initially. You can come across discussion you didn't even participate in even weeks and months later after it was posted.

I also believe that there is a process whereby folks including myself can continue to become or be thinkers about their lives, how they connect with a diverse world and what they can add to the planet. One of my bents is global thinking toward a win-win in everything I encounter. It can't always be done but one can come closer to accomplishing it if one has it as a goal from the outset.

Civility is a huge issue with me and I believe incivility rules in these United States. I think incivility and intolerance walk hand in hand down the path to the dumbing of America, prejudice, racism, poverty, add your own ism and are steeped in selfishness ergo no win-win.

If we can change our language we can redirect our thoughts and actual talk to people toward consensus, understanding and a more sustainable and livable society. The term "quality of life" comes to mind. I'm not saying lets all hold hands and kumbaya. I am saying there is a big difference between saying "if you are a Republican you are an idiot," and "I perceive Republican ideology to be thus and so and I disagree with it on points a,b,c for reasons e, f, g."

In the past I've tried to excuse myself and others for sensationalism because it is just a statement that gets attention and starts a conversation, blah, blah, blah but I think we should develop a distaste for such language in public forum and shy away from it. It may be that many who engage in this language have an aversion to truth and knowledge and a diverse points of view endeavoring to put themselves at the center of their universes and yours too....ergo no win-win..
How well am I doing? I have a ways to go or I would have left out the HNIC comment.
So I perhaps said all of this to conclude that I write using social media to change things for the better and probably to leave my mark.
So I am waiting with proverbial baited breath to hear why you do social media voodoo you do so well.
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Short Version: Mission

·Congruency

·To love God (the Divine) and my enemy

·to be content to enjoy life

·Breathe in/ Breathe out and let God Breathe out then Breathe in, so my
soul does breathe in/ breathe out.

Mission

·Congruency for myself, for other people and for organizations and
alliances.

·To love God (the Divine) with all my heart by manifesting a passion for
El Shaddai’s (Ultimate) truth, for compassion and for service to others.

·To love God (the Divine):

o with my entire mind by renewing it with eternal principles
for living true to myself, by recognizing the win-win scenario that may exist in
every circumstance I encounter.

oWith all of my soul by
acting on what is on my mind and in my heart and by obeying that “still small
voice” within me.

·to be content to enjoy life by understanding that the living and
praying into the journey is the key to real joy.

·I will always be where I am supposed to be no matter what the
circumstances may suggest. Circumstances are always subject to change that is
to say that change is their master.

I have an adage that I keep in mind that; Breathe
in/ Breathe out and let God Breathe out then Breathe in, so my soul breathes in/
breathes out. For me Breathe in
breathe out is more than a metaphor. I had this epiphany while meditating and
playing my didjeridoo.

We breathe in what the earth expels and the earth
breaths in what we expel as toxic.
I remember when Art Modell, the owner of the Cleveland Browns moved the
team to Baltimore and of course Browns fans were angry, to me short sightedly
angry. In a larger picture where
Cleveland and Baltimore are a unit or connected what seemed bad for Cleveland was good for
Modell and Baltimore and ultimately not bad for Cleveland.

Your Host

Cavana Faithwalker was born in Cleveland, Ohio. Much of his
worldview and values have been molded by his Blackness bestowed upon him in a
working class Black, urban neighborhood. He blames his packrat tendencies, the
economy in his art and poetry on being raised by an Alabama, depression baby
momma who was raised on a farm with her nine brothers and sisters. "She is
probably the reason I fight consumerism gone amuck and the overly me-ish
influence of our society," says Cavana.

His fascination with mechanical things, physics, his aesthetics,
his sense of humor and how things relate to each other comes from construction
worker dad and others.

He has a degree in public art marketing and management from
Cleveland State University. His major is composed of Urban Studies, Studio Art and Marketing.

He says his “new best friend” now is Amit Goswami a quantum
physicist turned spiritual guru and quantum activist. " I
think something is happening worldwide as far as spiritual consciousness.
For me after almost a quarter century of mainstream and somewhat
fundamentalist Christian dogma and orthodoxy, that whole thing is giving in to a new interpretation of what
the canon says and also what is myth and what is ‘reality.’

When it comes to orthodoxy and dogma I
rather like an adage attributed to Zen Buddhism, ‘when you meet the Buddha in
the road, kill the Buddha.’"

Cavana believes in congruency. “The more you can be in sync with your
authentic self the healthier you are and the more life you bring to the things
you do, yeah congruency.” He aims
at being content in life and enjoying life. His mantra is breathe in breathe out. “Through meditating when I play my didgeridoo
I may have zeroed in on the one thing that won’t change in my world view, it
may be the constancy that anchors me, the lessons in science, those
metaphysical concepts beyond the science of plant animal relationships
surrounding oxygen are powerful. A natural outcome of this mantra is thinking
win-win, big picture, and yin yang.

Perhaps when you gravitate to something or are in accord with something it was meant to be that revelations come through it.I learned to play the didjeridoo in 30 minutes, ‘circular’ breathing and how to make sounds.Many play along time without learning ‘circular breathing’ but it just seemed like the thing to do."

Cavana is a visual and performance artists, he sings and plays
didjeridu and is aiming at attaining some level of expertise at throat singing
also know as overtone singing.

Cavana was the Poet Laureate for the City of Cleveland Heights,
Ohio from 2011-2013.

"Muhammed Ali got me into poetry with his prose and antics in the
70s," Faithwalker says. "I would write prose poetry and recite
them for fellow students in high school." He won his first poetry
contest while in high school.

Today Cavana puts himself in the activist 'box'. "A lot of folks don't like labels but we are hardwired to label and pre judge. I read this sign that said activism is the rent for living on this planet, or something like that. I like that but even more so we are all activists if we become aware and congruent. We naturally care, compassion, and get involved and wear off on those that have been beat up too much to care and get involved - empowerment. When we get too beat up someone re empowers us. Romantic view I know and I try to live into it.